Just Sit
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Coda to "Sleeping Dogs". Hoshi gives T'Pol a Japanese meditation lesson in exchange for her Vulcan one.


Just Sit

By Laura Schiller

Based on: _Star Trek: Enterprise_

Copyright: Paramount

/

Ensign Hoshi Sato scurried around her cabin in a high state of nerves. She was a tidy person by nature, but tonight every wrinkle in her bedclothes looked deeper than it was, the photograph of her parents on the nightstand was smeared with fingerprints, and the smells – soap, shampoo, body odor, detergent, the _matcha_ tea she boiled up on the hot plate when she couldn't sleep sometimes – hung in the air like a thick cloud. What had she been thinking? Teaching a Vulcan about meditation techniques was like trying to teach a bird how to fly. This was going to be so awkward.

At 20:45, the doorbell beeped.

"Come in," Hoshi squeaked, smoothing down her T-shirt and sweatpants and kicking herself for not having her uniform on.

"Ensign." T'Pol glided into the room and inclined her head in greeting, not seeming to notice any of the flaws in the décor. She was still in uniform. Of course.

"Good evening, Subcommander. Would you, um, would you like some tea?"

"No, thank you, I am not thirsty. How would you like to proceed?"

T'Pol's low, precise voice and the way she phrased her question, letting Hoshi be in control, made her feel a little bit better. The Subcommander had been so kind to her on the Klingon ship, after all, talking her out of a panic attack with images of the ocean. And when Hoshi had offered to share _zazen_ with her in return, she'd seemed genuinely interested.

If only Hoshi weren't so rusty.

"Okay, let's see … " She glanced around her room. How very small her cabin was, with its single chair and narrow bed. "You can sit anywhere you like. The floor's got more space, but the bed's more comfortable, so … "

"Is comfort relevant?"

"Not to experts, I guess, but my mind's a lot clearer when my butt doesn't hurt." _Crap. You just had to mention butts, didn't you?_

A human colleague might have laughed or frowned, but T'Pol's face remained perfectly still as she settled herself on the bed. Hoshi sat down opposite her, as far away as the size of the furniture allowed. She was an expert at reading social cues, nonverbal as well as verbal, but the science officer gave her so little to work with that it always made her anxious. At the same time, she would have given anything to be more like T'Pol – poised, elegant, cool-headed in every crisis – instead of the bundle of nerves she was.

"Is there a particular posture you recommend?" T'Pol crossed her legs and straightened her back.

"You're in it already," said Hoshi, feeling amused in spite of her awkwardness by how similar they must look. Had any teacher ever had so little teaching to do? "We call it the lotus position. I usually sit with my hands like this - " She placed them on her knees, palms up, fingers loosely curled. "But your way works too."

T'Pol laced her fingers together in her lap, the index fingers aligned and pointing outward, and gave Hoshi a look of patient inquiry as she waited for instructions.

Hoshi squirmed internally, trying to think of a way to explain the philosophy of _zen_ when she herself didn't really understand it. She hadn't meditated since her grandfather's death. He was the one who had taught her, saying she mustn't forget her heritage, but she had always been more focused on the future than the past.

"Basically, the idea is to not think about anything at all," she said. "Or if you do, just to acknowledge the thought and then let it go. There's no words or visualization or anything, not like the exercise you showed me … "

"I understand," said T'Pol. "Children use a similar technique on Vulcan."

Children? Hoshi swallowed down the urge to curse in Vulcan, English and Japanese. So much for serenity. This was what came of trying too hard to impress your senior officer. Wasn't there anything this woman was not an expert at already?

Although …

"We do use _koans,_" she said. "They're a kind of riddle. They're meant to be deliberately illogical … " _Let's see what you make of that, Subcommander. _"To teach us to use our intuition. What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

T'Pol blinked, raised an eyebrow, tapped the metal bulkhead next to her with a flat palm, and then did the same to the blanket on which they were sitting. "That depends on the surface against which you clap," she said without missing a beat.

Hoshi gritted her teeth. The point of a _koan_ was to approach it from every possible angle, get frustrated, give up, and realize in a blinding flash of insight that the answer didn't matter. This insight was called _satori_ and it was unbelievably freeing, on the rare occasions one managed to achieve it. A _koan, _in short, was not meant to be solved logically, and especially not in a matter of seconds. Trust T'Pol to do it anyway. Was this what having an older sister felt like – wanting to impress her one minute, and throw something at her the next?

Even as she thought so, however, the absurdity of the situation did not escape her. She could practically hear _Ojii-san_'s rusty croak of a laugh. _Using zen in a game of one-upmanship with your colleague, are you? _He'd pretend to swat her upside the head and she'd dodge him easily. _Of course you don't know anything, Hoshi-chan. That's the point. The more you learn, the less you know._

"Yeah, okay," she said ruefully. "Never mind about the _koans_. We can just sit."

"Very well," said T'Pol, and that was the last either of them said for a while.

She'd forgotten how much work "just sitting" could be. Her head was a hopeless jumble of alien languages, T'Pol's perfectly even breathing, lingering irritation about the _koan_, stiffness in her back from sitting upright, a dry mouth, and a burst of homesickness that came in the wake of remembering her family. She could almost taste the tang of soy sauce in her grandmother's _oden_, feel the _tatami_ mats on her bare feet in their old country house, hear the distant chirp of birds outside, see her grandfather sitting opposite her, the lines of illness in his face smoothed out for once as his body relaxed ...

_Let it go, Hoshi-chan. You're not back there. You're right here. _

_Focus. Let it go._

A chime made her open her eyes.

"Twenty-one hours," said T'Pol, reading the digital clock on Hoshi's nightstand.

"Oh, Right. I programmed that for when it's time to go to sleep, otherwise I get caught up in work and I forget."

"A sensible precaution." T'Pol unfurled her legs and rose smoothly from the bed. "Thank you, Ensign."

"For what?" asked Hoshi, taken aback. "There was literally nothing I could tell you that you didn't already know."

"I had forgotten what it is to be silent in the company of another person." There was an odd, rough note in T'Pol's voice, as if she had a sore throat. Hoshi had a surprising thought: could it be that her Vulcan superior was homesick too?

"You know … you'd be welcome to stop by here again, Subcommander. If you like."

"Perhaps."

Turning to leave, the older woman paused and looked over her shoulder at Hoshi, who was still sitting on the bed. "Ensign … the reason Vulcan children begin with unstructured meditation is because it takes a lifetime to master."

Hoshi was so thrown by the unexpected sign of respect that by the time she thought of an answer, T'Pol was already out the door.


End file.
